concept of collaboration

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How has the concept of collaboration evolved? Discuss the importance of collaboration and the types of systems that can help support it. What are the primary obstacles to collaboration?

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Collaboration, literally, consists of working together with one or more other people.

Although the word collaboration is widely used in many varying contexts such as education, science, art and business, very little research has been carried out to determine the properties of this process. With the relatively recent advent of computer mediated communication (CMC), the nature of collaboration is coming under more intensive scrutiny. As software designers, facilitators and theorists from many diverse fields strive to create more useful and effective collaborative environments and methods, more light is shown on this ubiquitous and taken for granted practice. However, what light is being cast is still fairly refracted into the diverse fields in which the research is being carried out

One opinion is that whilst collaboration is natural in some societies, and is generally natural in pre-existing teams, collaboration is unnatural in new groups and western society. Some of the perceived barriers to collaboration are:

"stranger danger"; which can be expressed as a reluctance to share with others unknown to you
"needle in a haystack"; people believe that others may have already solved your problem but ...